wowza! this was a disappointment and a half!

apparently i'm one of those rare few who read the night circus and enjoyed the night circus but did not enjoy this. the sad thing is, it started really good! i was hyped! i wanted to explore a magical underground library hidden behind thousands of secret doors! but it felt like this story never went anywhere. it wandered around confusingly while i struggled to understand any of it. sometimes i'll read a book and not Get It and it'll all come together in the end, or i'll be so invested in the story that i have to reread it to pick up little context clues and piece together the details of the story the author is telling. gideon the ninth and harrow the ninth are good examples of this for me. was i mindnumbingly confused half the time i read them? yep! were they an amazingly good time? oh hell yeah! but this book was just BORING. by the time i was halfway through it i was rushing to get to the end so i could be done with all of it.

i wasn't attached enough to the characters (zachary was close but even he was just okay) to care about their romances and it didn't help that i was given no reason to care about them. zachary and dorian had the stupidest, boringest insta-love plotline i'd ever seen given to two gay characters, so wow. representation, i guess. now a gay man can also be a boring brooding love interest i do not care about! equality!

also also, and maybe this is petty, but the misuse of commas in this book was EGREGIOUS. like holy shit ms. morgenstern, has no one ever taught you what a semicolon is? it got so bad that i thought it was a stylistic choice for a little while because i couldn't remember the night circus having nearly as many errors like that. maybe the editors were changed? free grammar fact for anyone reading who doesn't know: commas cannot be used in place of periods or semicolons, despite looking like half of a semicolon. there are also a lot of run-on sentences where a comma would have really improved the flow, but there were no commas to be found. maybe they all got used up being put in other places unnecessarily. i feel bad being so mean about this but this is a published novel!! i really expected better at least in terms of sentence structure!

an extra star for the potential of this book and how invested i was at the beginning. wish it could have lived up to that potential.